Can VRM and Emanicpay help Tottol.com?

For Web2.0 businesses that have valuable content, but don't want to monetize through advertising or corporate sponsorship, sustaining themselves can be impossible. The VRM movement may have a solution coming - the proposed EmanciPay platform allows users to set micro-prices on content enabling them to vote with their wallets.

The CNET article How a kids video start-up stays afloat discusses
Totlol.com – a crowd-sourced guide and viewing portal to kid-friendly videos on You-Tube.

As TechCrunch reported on June 5, despite the great reviews and 150,000 views last month, Ron Ilan the sole developer and operator announced that he was shutting down the site due to an inability to monetize it.

Image via CrunchBase

Ilan says "While building Totlol I was constantly looking for ways to make it sustainable. I failed. A “normal” website would just “fill up” with ads, but Totlol is not a “normal” site. There are two things that set harsh limits on what can be done - the target audience and the usage of the YouTube platform. With Totlol you just can’t do what other websites do."

This got me thinking about the most popular Web2.0 business model - launch something useful to a large enough number of people, get lots of traffic and sell advertising space. Because end users are used to getting online services in return for the minor inconvenience of watching ads, if you begin to charge for your service, a free version with advertising will appear. And at this point there is no alternative business model.

However, I believe that help may be at hand for Ron Ilan and it comes from the EmanciPay project from the ProjectVRM community.

Grabbing a quote from the Emancipay VRM page will best explain the concept: "EmanciPay will involve what might be called "microaccounting," however, by keeping logs and histories that inform the user about what media content he or she has consumed. This will aid in valuing that content. Users will also be able to set what might be called "microprices" on items such as songs heard on radio and other music streaming sources, such as Pandora or Last.fm. A listener could, for example, say he or she will pay 1¢ per song, and have payments roll over when they reach a sum large enough to make the transaction worthwhile. Willingness to pay can also be aggregated among multiple users."

Keith Hopper's blog post Six Key Traits of VRM ListenLog provides an audio track explaining how it works. Another post concerning Emancipay can be found on Doc Searls weblog - We all have our crosses to climb

Interesting stuff indeed.